Self Made: NASE's Blog

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Tips to Improve Conversions on Social Media

Feb 07, 2017

If you are wondering how to improve your social landing pages, you are already on the right track. Many businesses — even large, well-established companies — make the mistake of using the same landing pages for all entry points. Social landing pages are funneling customers toward conversion exclusively from your social media networks. Here is how to increase conversions among this specific — and valuable — group.

1. Optimize Each Social Landing Page for Buying Stags
Different entry points bring buyers to landing pages from different parts of the funnel. PPC visitors, for example, are arriving at your landing pages from the bottom of the funnel. They have done their research, they have read the reviews and they are ready to buy — they are just waiting for the right time and the right price.

Social visitors, on the other hand, are just beginning their purchasing journey. They may not be at all familiar with your brand or product. It is critical to use the limited time your visitors will spend on your landing pages familiarizing them with who you are and what you do — and ensuring that they'll remember after they leave.

Since social visitor are at the top of the funnel, focus on serving images and content about problems and pain points. Identify their challenges and serve content and images that they can relate to. For example, if you sell yoga clothes, talk to them about the difficulty of finding inexpensive, comfortable yoga outfits.

2. Ensure Continuity Between Social Pages and Landing Pages
Since your social visitors are arriving from the top of the funnel, they have to be reassured right away that they've landed in the right place, otherwise they will almost certainly leave before coming close to anything resembling a conversion. Make sure that your color scheme, fonts, images, logos and even your watermarks are the same on your landing pages as they are on the social ads and pages of origin.

3. Consistency in Messaging
Brand continuity extends beyond the look and feel of a page. You have to match the exact verbiage and messaging — especially when it comes to expressing the value proposition — of your social ads to your landing pages.

If the text in a social ad reads "20 percent off," then the landing page must parrot that language exactly. If not — just as with inconsistent layout — the visitor may not be certain that they clicked the right ad or link, or that they landed in the right place.

4. Create Great Calls to ActionCTAs on social landing pages should be positioned above the fold, and they should contain language specific to the action you're encouraging. Avoid language like "click here" or "sign me up." Instead, use powerful phrases like "Get the Free eBook" or "Make an Appointment." Keep it brief — don't use more than five words per CTA. Since you are at the top of the funnel, your goal is to capture their email address or phone number in order to gain access to them to continue marketing to them further.

Design CTAs in colors that attract the eye. The best way to do this is to use colors that contrast against the background. Walk a fine line in CTA size — they should be big enough to stand out, but not so big that they detract from your copy, videos or complementary images.

Use case studies and ebooks to help you move people along the buying funnel. In this example, LinkResearchTools produced significant content around a problem - Penguin 4.0 - in order to get people thoroughly familiar with a pain point and potential solutions. It’s a powerful way to move visitors down the buying funnel.

5. Include Video
According to research, the inclusion of video on landing pages can increase conversions by as much as 80 percent, making video one of the most powerful conversion boosters available. Video also increases the amount of time that visitors spend on landing pages, which is a critical precursor to conversion. When businesses use video that includes images of their employees, they increase trust and humanize their business.

6. Conduct A/B Testing to Ensure Constant Improvement
Conduct side-by-side A/B testing on different variations of your landing pages. Use a champion vs. challenger comparison format that pits a strong landing page against a variation you hope will perform even better. Test a page with a longer video vs. that with a shorter one. Test new color schemes, fonts and images against those contained in the champion page, and assign traffic weight depending on the page you're testing.

Analysis and testing is a major part of creating great social landing pages — but you must focus on fundamentals first. Like all landing pages, social landing pages should contain brief, powerful copy and short, dynamic headlines. Remember that most people don't spend a lot of time on landing pages, so you should hook them with a slogan and video that is scheduled for autoplay. Most importantly, make sure that your brand identity is consistent between your landing pages and your social pages.